Supporters of freedom, right?

‘[T]hey're calling for freedoms. They want more freedoms in their country,’ said the newsreader on Sky News, of the protesters on Egypt’s streets. ‘What's Australia's view on that? Do we support that?’

You’d think that, for a foreign minister, the question was a gentle full toss to be dispatched effortlessly to the boundary. Are you for kittens? What’s your opinion about motherhood?

Freedom? Of course, we support freedom! Don’t we?

Here’s how Rudd answered:

Well the political situation is highly fluid, as a number of my colleagues from elsewhere around the world have said. We have long supported democratic transformation across the Middle East. We have equally strongly argued that this transformation should occur peacefully and without violence. That remains our view in terms of recent developments in Egypt as well.

I should add to what I just said before that earlier today I met with and had discussions with the foreign minister of Egypt in Addis Ababa, where we were both attending the African Union Summit and we discussed these matters in some detail there as well.

Bear in mind that, as the conversation took place, the news footage showed government thugs attacking demonstrators on the streets. Those protesters would, no doubt, have preferred, quite possibly rather more than Mr Rudd, a democratic transformation effected peacefully - but that wasn’t happening, what with all the tear gas being fired at them. So would Rudd call upon Mubarak to, like, stop repressing his citizens?

The newsreader pressed some more.

“The White House is suggesting that the Egyptians turn the internet back on and the social networks, that sort of thing, and of course to end the violence. You'd be supportive of that, would you?”

Again, Rudd would have none of it:

Well I've not seen White House statements to that effect. I go back to what I said before. We ourselves have long supported democratic transformation across the Middle East and across the Arab world, but equally we strongly emphasise the importance for those things to occur peacefully and without violence.

Note the ‘but’ in the second sentence. The implied contrast with Rudd’s support for ‘democratic transformation’ suggests that the condemnation of violence is directed at the protesters rather than those firing rubber bullets and tear gas at them.

The last few weeks have been an interesting time for freedom, a concept that, was, not so very long ago, ostentatiously central to Western foreign policy.

“Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty,” President Bush explained in one of his early speeches.

“As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.”

That ‘Freedom Agenda’ underpinned the whole Iraq adventure. As Bush told the world in 2003, “Iraqi democracy will succeed, and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran, that freedom can be the future of every nation.”

Well, the future’s now announcing its arrival on the streets of Cairo and Suez. Yet, suddenly, the White House is not so keen. Thus, when the protests began, Hillary Clinton and her spokesman, PJ Crowley hailed Mubarak as an ‘anchor of stability’ providing vital assistance to US regional goals, while vice president Joe Biden explained, with the chutzpah of old-style Stalinist apparatchik, that the Egyptian president was not, in fact, a ‘dictator’.

Since then, as the Egyptian regime becomes increasingly untenable, the tenor of the American rhetoric has shifted. Yet Obama has still not demanded that Mubarak go nor has he thrown his support unambiguously behind the revolution. And like Rudd, he’s counterposed calls for reform in the abstract with an insistence on restraint by the people whose courage on the streets is precisely what’s made reform a possibility.

In other words, the Obama administration and its allies have behaved exactly in the fashion that Bush decried. They’re excusing and accommodating a lack of freedom; they’re more or less explicitly seeking to purchase stability at the expense of liberty.

That being said, Obama’s response represents not so much a break with the policies of the Bush administration as a continuation of it. For the ‘freedom agenda’, of course, always applied to some countries and not others. Iran and North Korea, for instance, but never Saudia Arabia. In Iraq, especially, there were never any qualms about democratic transformations taking place ‘peacefully and without violence’. There, violence was regarded - quite openly, even enthusiastically - as the handmaiden of freedom. Hence Shock and Awe. Hence the ongoing occupation.

So even as Bush lauded democracy for Baghdad, he - like his predecessors, and, yes, like his successor - maintained the flow of money and weapons to the Mubarak dictatorship. The Egyptian military receives something $1.3 billion annually from the US, and has done so for the last three decades. The current uprising has produced many iconic images but one of them is surely the photo of an empty tear gas canister held by a protester. The label reads: ‘Made in the USA’.

Oh, we all know the rationale. Mubarak is one of the few Arab allies of Israel, and has played a crucial role enforcing the siege of Gaza. He’s relentlessly opposed to Islamism, maintaining the longstanding persecution of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. And, he’s reliably pro-business, an advocate of the neo-liberal economics that always underpinned Bush’s foreign policy (indeed, Juan Cole points out that the Egyptian revolt is, at least in part, spurred by the class polarisation under Mubarak).

All of that has underpinned Western support for repression. The Mubarak regime is synonymous with torture, and has been for years. It’s no secret: it’s never been a secret. The Egyptian police and security forces brutalise detainees so openly that, in 2007, officers filmed themselves torturing a prisoner - and then unconcernedly sent the video to his friends.

And what’s the Australian position been during all of that? Well, only last year, Kevin Rudd was in Cairo to meet with Mubarak.

“Could I begin by again affirming the strength of this important bilateral relationship,” he said, before devoting the ensuing press conference to running through the usual Western talking points: trade, the Middle Eastern peace process, Iranian nuclear weapons.

Human rights in Egypt? Democracy? Freedom? No, not so much.

But it gets worse. You see, when Mubarak, rather astonishingly, abolished his government and appointed a new one, he named as his new vice president a certain Omar Suleiman. Now Suleiman, Egypt’s head of security, is well-known to US leaders, since he’s been the go-to guy every time the CIA wanted to outsource torture through its program of ‘extraordinary rendition’.

Yes, that’s one of the advantages of an alliance with a brutal tyranny: there’s someone else who can do that messy bone-breaking for you.

But, then, Australia knows something about that, too. For Mamdouh Habib, the Australian Guantanamo detainee, says that one of the people torturing him was none other than the new vice president Suleiman. Here’s Richard Neville writing in Crikey:

In Egypt, where torture seems to be a Government sport, Habib was interrogated by the country’s intelligence director, General Omar Suleiman, whose is ranked second in power to president Hosni Mubarak. Back in 2001, Suleiman took a personal interest in anyone suspected of links with Al Qaeda. As Habib had visited Afghanistan shortly before 9/11, he was under suspicion. Suleiman slapped Habib’s face so hard, the blindfold was dislodged, revealing the torturer’s identity. According to his memoir, Habib was repeatedly zapped with high-voltage electricity, immersed in water up to his nostrils, beaten, his fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks.

He was again interrogated by Omar Suleiman. To loosen Habib’s tongue, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a gruesomely shackled Turkistan prisoner in front of Habib – and he did, with a vicious karate kick.

Habib also says that Australian officials were present during some of these sessions - and he has witness statements to that effect. A former Egyptian military intelligence officer working at the Cairo prison housing detainees says: “During Habib's presence some of the Australian officials attended many times... The same official who attended the first time used to come with them. Habib was tortured a lot and all the time, as the foreign intelligence wanted quick and fast information.”

The various deals brokered by the Australian Government and its intelligence agencies will, in all probability, keep under wraps (as they are intended to do) the evidence supporting Habib’s allegations of seven months of torture: the beatings, electric shocks, water torture, sexual assault, cigarette burns and the rest of it.

But what we’ve already learned stinks to high heaven, and makes Rudd’s pious lectures to protesters about violence seem like the rankest hypocrisy. Whatever else the demonstrators might have done, they’re not hanging people up by hooks.

So as Mubarak attempts to foist his torturer-in-chief upon the Egyptian populace, the very least Australia can do - given its past connections with the barbarisms of the regime - is make an unambiguous statement of support for the people against the dictatorship.

After all, it should be a no-brainer. What’s Australia’s view on freedom? Do we support that?

To paraphrase William Morris, Cairo’s about to fall - into the hands of those it belongs to. So which side will the Australian Government be on?